# Mapping Temporary Slums from Satellite Imagery using a Semi-Supervised Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.04419 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04419/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Interpolation Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03825/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Cross-View Meets Diffusion: Aerial Image Synthesis with Geometry and Text Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04224/) (2024)
- [Generalizable Slum Detection from Satellite Imagery with Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10300/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Topology for Domain Adaptive Road Segmentation in Satellite and Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15625/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Slum Mapping in Remote Sensing Images: A Meta-analysis and Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08031/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

One billion people worldwide are estimated to be living in slums, and documenting and analyzing these regions is a challenging task. As compared to regular slums; the small, scattered and temporary nature of temporary slums makes data collection and labeling tedious and time-consuming. To tackle this challenging problem of temporary slums detection, we present a semi-supervised deep learning segmentation-based approach; with the strategy to detect initial seed images in the zero-labeled data settings. A small set of seed samples (32 in our case) are automatically discovered by analyzing the temporal changes, which are manually labeled to train a segmentation and representation learning module. The segmentation module gathers high dimensional image representations, and the representation learning module transforms image representations into embedding vectors. After that, a scoring module uses the embedding vectors to sample images from a large pool of unlabeled images and generates pseudo-labels for the sampled images. These sampled images with their pseudo-labels are added to the training set to update the segmentation and representation learning modules iteratively. To analyze the effectiveness of our technique, we construct a large geographically marked dataset of temporary slums. This dataset constitutes more than 200 potential temporary slum locations (2.28 square kilometers) found by sieving sixty-eight thousand images from 12 metropolitan cities of Pakistan covering 8000 square kilometers. Furthermore, our proposed method outperforms several competitive semi-supervised semantic segmentation baselines on a similar setting. The code and the dataset will be made publicly available.